From my perspective Astaro v5 is a surprising and dissapointing experience relative to Astaro v4. Astaro v4 is a swift, thin, functional firewall. It is relatively easy to learn and implement. I began to think that I would recommend the software further - I no longer think so.
With v5 it seems that the star in Astaro may have fallen. My own experience with v5 is frustrating, especially because my expectations were raised by the easy experienced with v4. It seems in many respects, that Astaro has taken a tremendous step backwards with v5.
For example, the Webadmin interface is miserable. We are presented with clunky icons that were not well thought out - making the user interface more difficult to use than v4 - and substantially more difficult to learn. It is slow, oh so slow, even over gigabit ethernet.
The POP3 proxy, even though users have spotted bugs in it weeks ago, remains unworkable in v5.004. Oft used clients such as MS Outlook receive timeout errors. Are we left with just opening ports with a packet filter?
The presentation of the logs, while not great in v4, are embarrassingly bad in v5. Try to take a look at a packet filter log after a few days (or better yet, don't try). v5 will try to present the entire file to you in memory within your browser making it impossible to navigate, search, or generally use your machine for the duratioin you keep the log open - even on beefy CPUs with lots of memory.
In fact, while I believe that the work on v5 was done by highly accomplished individuals, the changes to the user interface look more like they were added because someone thought they might "look cool" rather than serve users as a functional interface. Simplicity is an artform - and unfortunately Astraro, you lost that artform in v5.
In our house, we use VOIP for telephone service. Establishing service through Astaro v4 was unchallenging. Yet I have not yet been able to establish service with v5. One would expect that the experience learned in a previous version would be applicable to the latest version, but this is not so with Astaro - and if other users have similar difficulties this interface could become a major strategic error in my opinion.
Astaro is free to home users - but v5's unreliability, and miserable, unresponsibe user interface seems likely to lead many to the conclusion that free is still too high a price - or to low a cost/benefit ratio, relative to other, competing solutions. Were this to occur, I think it would be a great loss not just to Astaro, but to us, the user base.
I like Astaro v4 - and I have been even proud to be a user of Astaro Security Linux. This means that my motivation for writing this message is not to disregard Astaro's hard work on v5, but to point out that the decisions made in v5 are somewhat dissapointing.
I think Astaro can be better than v5. I think Astaro should be better than v5. I think v5 should be better than v4 - but to date, it is simply not.
v5.004 is still a release candidate, not a general release version. But Astaro has written that only virus detection will be changed when the software is released generally. Too bad. It woud be a relief if the POP3 proxy were going to be fixed so that users could recieve email through an Astaro firewall. It would be a relief if some thought were going to be given to the user interface.
Again, I write because of how much I liked Astaro v4, and due to how high it raised my expectations and due to how well that product has served as a firewall.
I'd like to see that stability, useability, and simplicity continue in future versions of Astaro, rather than subside into the past.
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